American military aviation began at the Fort Bliss airfield in 1916, when the First Aero Squadron used it as a staging base while hunting Pancho Villa in nearby Mexico. Now, almost half a century later, the airfield, called Biggs, was part of the Strategic Air Command and served as home base for heavy bombers like the B-52 Stratofortress. Beginning in 1960, the facility was also a staging area for secret CIA missions that were part of Project Palladium, and that same year, T. D. Barnes found himself standing on the tarmac at Biggs Airfield watching a group of airmen as they delicately loaded a Hawk missile into the cargo bay of an airplane. Weapons are supposed to go in the weapons bay, Barnes thought to himself. But the project Barnes was participating in was unusual, dangerous, and top secret. Barnes did not have a need-to-know what the big picture involved and he knew better than to ask. Instead, he climbed into the cargo bay and sat down beside the missile. “We had the nose cone off and part of the skin off too. The missile was loaded on a stand inside the plane. It was my job to watch the electronics respond,” Barnes explains. The airplane and its crew took off from the airbase and headed for Cuba. The plan was for the airplane to fly right up to the edge of Cuban airspace but not into it. Moments before the airplane crossed into Cuban airspace, the pilot would quickly turn around and head home. By then, the Russian radar experts working the Cuban radar sites would have turned on their systems to track the U.S. airplane. Russian MiG fighter jets would be sent aloft to respond. The job of Project Palladium was to gather the electronic intelligence being sent out by the radar stations and the MiGs. That was the first step in figuring out how to create a jamming system for the A-12 at Area 51.
The Cubans and their Russian patrons could not have had any idea whether the Americans were playing another game of chicken or if this act meant war. “Soviet MiGs would scramble toward us,” Barnes recalls. “At the time, ECM [electronic countermeasure] and ECCM [electronic counter-countermeasure] technology were still new to both the plane and the missile. We’d transmit a Doppler signal from a radar simulator which told their MiG pilots that a missile had locked on them. When the Soviet pilots engaged their ECM against us, my job was to sit there and watch how our missile’s ECCM responded. If the Soviet signal jammed our missile and made it drift off target, I’d tweak my missile’s ECCM electronics to determine what would override a Soviet ECM signal.” Though primitive by today’s standards, what Barnes and the NSA agents with him inside the aircraft did laid the early groundwork for electronic warfare today. “Inside the airplane, we’d record the frequencies to be replayed back at Fort Bliss for training and design. Once we got what we wanted we hauled ass out of the area to avoid actual contact with Soviet planes.”
The info that Barnes and his colleagues were getting over Cuba was filling in gaps that had previously been unknown. Back at Fort Bliss, Barnes and the others would interpret what NSA had captured from the Soviet/Cuban ECM transmissions that they had recorded during the flight. In listening to the decrypted Soviet responses to the antagonistic moves, the CIA learned what the Soviets could and could not see on their radars. This technology became a major component in further developing stealth technology and electronic countermeasures and was why Barnes was later placed by the CIA to work at Area 51. For the U.S. Air Force, this marked the beginning of a new age of information warfare.
Even though the U.S. military airplane with a team of engineers, NSA agents, and a Hawk missile hidden inside would U-turn and fly away at the last moment, just before violating Cuban airspace, “there were repercussions,” according to Barnes. “It scared the living daylights out of them and it escalated things.” In January of 1961, Khrushchev gathered a group of Cuban diplomats at their embassy in Moscow. “Alarming news is coming from Cuba at present, news that the most aggressive American monopolists are preparing a direct attack on Cuba,” Khrushchev told the group. Barnes believes Khrushchev “may have been referring to our messing with them with our Hawk missiles homing in on their planes.” Were that the case, Khrushchev had a valid point. But the mercurial dictator had his own difficulties in sticking to the facts. Disinformation was a hallmark of the Soviet propaganda machine.
To a roomful of Cuban diplomats, many of whom knew otherwise, Khrushchev falsely claimed, “What is more, [the Americans] are trying to present the case as though rocket bases of the Soviet Union are being set up or are already established in Cuba. It is well known that this is foul slander. There is no Soviet military base in Cuba.” Actually, this is exactly what the Soviets were doing. “Of course we knew better, and on January 3, 1961, severed all diplomatic ties with Cuba,” Barnes explains.
Ten days later, the CIA convened its Special Group, a secret committee inside the National Security Council that had oversight regarding CIA covert activities. A formal decision was made that Castro’s regime “must be overthrown.” The man in charge of making sure this happened was Richard Bissell. In addition to being the highest-ranking CIA officer in the Special Operations Group, Bissell was also the most trusted CIA officer in the eyes of John F. Kennedy, the dashing new president. Before taking office, a member of the White House transition team asked Kennedy who he trusted most in the intelligence community. “Richard Bissell,” Kennedy said without missing a beat.
Bissell’s official title was now deputy director of plans. As innocuous as it sounded, DDP was in fact a euphemism for chief of covert operations for the CIA. This meant Bissell was in charge of the Agency’s clandestine service, its paramilitary operations. The office had previously been known as the Office of Policy Coordination, or OPC. As deputy director of plans, Richard Bissell would be doing a lot more than playing a gentleman’s spy game from the air. The CIA’s paramilitary operations spilled blood. During these covert antiCommunist operations, men were dying in droves from Hungary to Greece to Iran, and all of these operations had to be planned, staged, and approved by the deputy director of plans.
In such a position there was writing on the wall, script that Richard Bissell did not, or chose not to, see. The man he was replacing was Frank Wisner, his old friend and the man who first introduced Bissell to the CIA. It was Frank Wisner who’d knocked on Bissell’s door unannounced and then spent a fireside evening in Bissell’s Washington, DC, parlor eleven years before. It was Wisner who had originally asked Bissell to siphon off funds from the Marshall Plan and hand them over to the CIA, no questions asked. Wisner had served the Agency as deputy director of plans from August 1951 to January 1959, but by the end of the summer of 1958, the job proved too psychologically challenging for him — Frank Wisner had begun displaying the first signs of madness. The diagnosis was psychotic mania, according to author Tim Weiner. Doctors and drugs did not help. Next came the electroshock treatment: “For six months, his head was clamped into a vise and shot through with a current sufficient to fire a hundred-watt light bulb.” Frank Wisner emerged from the insane asylum zombielike and went on to serve as the CIA’s London station chief. A broken man, Wisner did not last long overseas. He shuffled in and out of mad-houses for years until finally forced to retire in 1962: “He’d been raving about Adolf Hitler, seeing things, hearing voices. He knew he would never be well.” Tragically, on October 29, 1965, Wisner was getting ready to go hunting with his old CIA friend Joe Bryan at his country estate when he took a shotgun out of his gun cabinet and put a bullet in his own head.
The pressure that came with being the deputy director of plans for the CIA was, for some, as treacherous as a loaded gun.
As workers toiled away at Area 51 getting ready for the arrival of the Oxcart spy plane, Richard Bissell focused on his orders to rid Cuba of Fidel Castro. By 1961, the Agency decided that Bahнa de Cochinos, or the Bay of Pigs, was the perfect place to launch its “paramilitary plan.” The little sliver of coastline on the south shore of the island was barely inhabited. A few summer cottages were scattered among little bays, used mostly for fishing and swimming, and there was a valuable asset nearby in “an airstrip not far from the beach.”
Sure
ly, the U-2 spy plane could help in gathering intel, Bissell decided. After Gary Powers was shot down, President Eisenhower had promised the world there would be no spy missions over Russia, but that promise did not include dangerous Soviet proxies like Cuba. In his new position as deputy director of plans, Bissell had used the U-2 to gather intelligence before. Its photographs had been helpful in planning paramilitary operations in Laos and the Dominican Republic. And in Cuba, overhead photographs taken by the Agency’s U-2s revealed important details regarding the terrain just up the beach from the Bay of Pigs beach. Photo interpreters determined that the swampland in the area would be hard to run in unless the commandos familiarized themselves with preexisting trails. As for the water landing itself, from seventy thousand feet in the air, the beachhead at the Bay of Pigs looked flat and lovely. But because cameras could not photograph what lay underwater, Bissell had no idea that just beneath the surface of the sea there was a deadly coral reef that would later greatly impede the water landing by commandos.
Hundreds of pages, declassified after thirty years, reveal the hand of economics wizard Richard Bissell in the design of the paramilitary operation. Bissell painstakingly outlined: “Contingency Plans… Probabilities… Likelihood, chance of success… Plans for Operation ‘T,’… Operation ‘Z,’… Phase 1, Phase 2, and Phase 3… Pre-Day Day plans… D-Day plans… Post D-Day plans… Unattributable actions by the Navy… Post-Recognition Plans… Arguments for maximum sabotage… Arguments for simultaneous defection… Feasibility of declaration of war by certain Central American states… Disclosures… Non-Disclosures… Continuation of Psychological Warfare Plans… How to deal, and how not to deal with the press.” For all the organization and preplanning, the operation might have been successful. But there are many reasons why it failed so tragically. When the Bay of Pigs operation was over, hundreds of CIA-trained, anti-Castro Cuban exiles were killed on approach or left to die on the beachhead at the Bay of Pigs. Those that lived to surrender were imprisoned and later ransomed back to the United States. When the story became public, so did brigade commander Pepe San Roman’s last words before his capture: “Must have air support in the next few hours or we will be wiped out. Under heavy attacks by MiG jets and heavy tanks.” Pepe San Roman begged Richard Bissell for help. “All groups demoralized… They consider themselves deceived.” By the end of the day, Richard Bissell’s world had begun to fall irreparably apart. The Bay of Pigs would be his downfall.
There was plenty of blame to go around but almost all of it fell at the feet of the CIA. In the years since, it has become clear that equal blame should be imputed to the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and President Kennedy. Shortly before he died, Richard Bissell blamed the mission’s failure on his old rival General Curtis LeMay. Bissell lamented that if LeMay had provided adequate air cover as he had promised, the mission would most likely have been a success. The Pentagon has historically attributed LeMay’s failure to send B-26 bombers to the Bay of Pigs to a “time zone confusion.” Bissell saw the mix-up as personal, believing that LeMay had been motivated by revenge. That he’d harbored a grudge against Bissell for the U-2 and Area 51. Whatever the reason, more than three hundred people were dead and 1,189 anti-Castro guerrillas, left high and dry, had been imprisoned. The rivalry between Bissell and LeMay was over, and the Bay of Pigs would force Richard Bissell to leave government service in February of 1962. There were many government backlashes as a result of the fiasco. One has been kept secret until now, namely that President Kennedy sent the CIA’s inspector general at the time, Lyman B. Kirkpatrick Jr., out to Area 51 to write up a report on the base. More specifically, the president wanted to assess what other Richard Bissell disasters in the making might be coming down the pipeline at Area 51.
Adding friction to an already charged situation was the fact that by some accounts, Kirkpatrick held a grudge. Before the Bay of Pigs, Richard Bissell was in line to succeed Allen Dulles as director of the CIA, and eight years earlier, Lyman Kirkpatrick had worn those coveted shoes. But like Bissell, Kirkpatrick was cut down in his prime. Kirkpatrick’s loss came not by his own actions but by a tragic blow beyond his control. On an Agency mission to Asia in 1952, Lyman Kirkpatrick contracted polio and became paralyzed from the waist down. Confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, Kirkpatrick was relegated to the role of second-tier bureaucrat.
In a world of gentlemen spy craft and high-technology espionage, bureaucracy was considered glorified janitorial work. But when Kirkpatrick was dispatched to Area 51 by JFK, the fate and future of the secret base Richard Bissell had built in the Nevada desert lay in Lyman Kirkpatrick’s hands.
Chapter Nine: The Base Builds Back Up
As the man in charge of property control at Area 51, Jim Freedman was a taskmaster. “It was my job to provide services for all the different groups at the area,” Freedman explains. “This included the CIA, the Air Force, EG&G, REECo [Reynolds Electric and Engineering], and even Howard Hughes — an individual who very few people had any idea had his own hangar out at the Ranch.” What exactly Hughes was doing at Area 51 remains classified as of 2011, but Freedman explains the dynamic that was at play. “The CIA liked to foster competition between groups. It was why we had Kodak and Polaroid, Lockheed and North American, EG&G and Hughes. They were all no-bid contracts for security reasons. But competition keeps people on their toes.” Jim Freedman acted as the gofer among the groups from 1960 until 1974. If a scientist needed a widget, if an engineer needed an oscilloscope, or if a radar expert needed a piece of magnetic tape, it was Freedman’s job to get it, fast. As a prerequisite for the job, Freedman knew how to keep secrets. He carried a top secret and a Q clearance and had worked for EG&G since 1953. “We worked under a code that said, ‘What you learn here, leave here.’ That was pretty simple to follow,” says Freedman. “You couldn’t afford to talk. You’d lose your job and you’d be blackballed. So instead, my wife and family thought I fixed TVs. ‘How was your day, Dad?’ my kids would ask when I got home. ‘Great!’ I’d say. ‘I fixed twenty-four TVs.’”
As they had been with the Manhattan Project, the various jobs going on at Area 51 were compartmentalized for Oxcart, so that every person worked within very strict need-to-know protocols. The radar people had no idea about the ELINT people, who had no idea what any of the search-and-rescue teams were up to. Each group worked on its part of the puzzle. Each man was familiar with his single piece. Only a few individuals, officers working in managerial capacities, understood a corner of the puzzle — at most. But someone had to act as a go-between among these disparate groups, and in this way, Freedman became an individual who knew a lot more than most about the inner workings of Area 51.
He also knew the layout of the base. Most Area 51 workers were confined to the building, or buildings, they worked in, the building they slept in, and the mess hall, where everybody dined together. As the Area 51 runner, Freedman “went to places out there that I don’t think other people even knew were out there.” For example, Freedman says, there was “the faraway runway where people who were not supposed to be seen by others were brought into the base.” Freedman tells a story of one such group, the exact date of which he can’t recall but that was during the Vietnam War. “One day I was out there delivering something to someone, it was three in the morning, and I watched an airplane land. Then I watched forty-one Vietnamese men get off the plane. I never saw the men again, but a few days later I was sent on an errand. My supervisor said, ‘Jim, can you go to Las Vegas and get me x number of pounds of a special kind of rice?’ I’d say it was fairly obvious who that rice was being requested for.” Freedman elaborates: “These [foreign nationals] were being trained to use stateof-the-art Agency equipment out at the Area, which they probably took with them when they left and went and put behind enemy lines.”
Freedman’s first job at the test site had been installing radios in EG&G vehicles used during weapons tests. Next, he was trained as an engineer in the art of wiring nuclear bo
mbs. In the 1950s, Freedman participated in dozens of nuclear tests on the arming and firing party alongside Al O’Donnell at the test site and also at the Pacific Proving Ground. “I even managed to survive a helicopter crash in the Marshall Islands,” Freedman adds. In 1957, EG&G learned that Freedman had studied photography after high school and assigned him to a team photographing nuclear explosions. But by 1960, the nuclear-test-ban treaty was in effect, testing had moved underground, and Freedman’s life had taken what he called “a dull turn.”
One afternoon, he was sitting inside an EG&G warehouse in Las Vegas, cleaning camera equipment. “I was thinking about how fast office work gets boring when my boss walked up to me and said, ‘Hey, Jim, do you want to go work on a secret project?’” Freedman didn’t hesitate. “I said yes, because it sounded interesting, and I wound up at Area 51. I’d never heard of the place before I went there. I never knew it existed just over the hill from the Nevada Test Site where I’d worked for so many years. Neither did anyone else who didn’t have a need-toknow.” When Freedman arrived at Area 51, it felt to him “like I was arriving on the far side of the moon. You know about the bright side of the moon; well, in relative terms, that was what the test site was like. Area 51 was the dark side.” What began as a short-term contract in December of 1960 would last for Jim Freedman for the next fourteen years.
Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base Page 18